Long time no post

I’ve been under the weather for most of the week so most of my time has been spent prone and moaning, and not in a good way. I loathe being sick, because not only is it unpleasant for me, but it puts such stress on Caitlin and Nefarious as well, and the guilt I feel about that is much worse than the physical pain. However, today things took a turn for the better in a few ways, not least of which was my neighbor signing for a UPS package for me that I missed due to listening to music at a higher volume than the doorbell. I got Caitlin a Kindle for Christmas, and she seems to really like it. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to really get into a Kindle, because “it’s not a book”, and as someone who’s always been surrounded by books I found it hard to believe that the experience would have the same tactile satisfaction. However, when I took Nefarious and Cassie to see The Squeakquel on the weekend — something I had zero interest in attending — I brought her Kindle along to try it out in the lobby as they giggled away in the back row of the theatre, and I loved using it. I found that not only was the experience of reading as good as on a paper book, but that because of the single-page isolation of the interface that I found myself reading sequentially with care and attention, a skill that I worried I’d lost after years of hopping around the net consuming a scattered chaos of bite-sized fragments of disconnected data… So in some ways it was actually better than a book. I immediately went and ordered myself a Kindle as well, although I got the big one for myself, and that’s what came in the mail today. Anyway, below is my new toy, as well as a neat crystal that Nefarious grew from a Christmas stocking gift… I think it’s salt but I’m not sure. Oh, and Nefarious read for an hour and a half tonight, making it to halfway through The Goblet of Fire‘s well over six hundred pages. It’s actually quite amazing how quickly it goes.

Meh, I’ll never fall in love with the Kindle..
For me, reading books has to be something very simple and basic. And I like having the book standing on my bookshelf afterwards, reminding me of how much I enjoyed reading it.

Nygaard, I expected I would feel the same way until I tried it. I used to prefer having physical music as well… Ultimately it’s the data, not the medium that I like, even if I have a certain nostalgia for the medium. Give it a try, you may be surprised (as I was).

Well, maybe I’ll give it a shot then.. Is it a different feeling from reading on a laptop?
I will definitely get one if they start to publish some of the textbooks I need though. It would be much more convenient and probably a lot cheaper in the long run.

I still havn’t moved on when it comes to music and probably never will haha. FLAC on the iPod and Squeezebox Duet for everyday use, because it is so easy.
But when I take the time to just sit down and listen, only vinyl will do..
Beautiful tunes in a dark room, with the only light source being the soft glow from the mono block tube amps… My analogue Zen garden.

It’s COMPLETELY different from reading on a laptop. To my amazement it’s “more book than book” in some ways… because it’s awkward to flip through like one can a book, I find that it forces me into a sort of traditional reading that I haven’t done in a long time.

Now I HAVE to get one, just to see if it is actually that good!
They seem pretty popular too, so I guess it won’t be hard to sell it again if I don’t like it.

It would be great for the “U.S. only” titels too.
Every time I receive a book that has been through the whole international postal machinery and half way around the globe, it looks like the personel that was hired to “handle my mail with care” just got really, really drunk and decided to beat each other stupid with whatever they had at hand.
Even if I ask the company to wrap an extra layer of cardboard around it, it ends up looking more abused than a secondhand book!

Nygaard: Ah, you might want to verify availability first if you’re into buying a lot of US-only titles. I don’t know where you’re from, but for Canada at least, ebook and digitally-distributed audiobook rights are still pretty screwed up. There are a lot of ebooks and audiobooks that Amazon and Audible won’t/can’t sell to Canadians.

I have a nook arriving today, hopefully. I’m running out of space for books. I love books, but my house is only oh so big, so going digital was the next logical step for me. I’m really excited about it.

My difficulty with the kindle is the fact that the screen flashes black every time you advance a page. As a fast reader, starts out by annoying me and quickly ends up making me feel nauseated. The nook has the same problem. I wanted to like them, but I just don’t. Sigh.

Make sure you log out of your Amazon account or use a different browser, then in the upper-left you can change the region to US, UK, Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, India, Latin America, and the Middle East. The US for example has 413,505 Kindle books, while Canada has only 339,926.

With that many titles it might not seem like much, but my Kindle DX arrived on Friday (decided not to wait on Apple!) and when I went to buy some William Gibson books I was only allowed to buy Part 1 of the Sprawl trilogy and Part 2 & 3 of the Bridge trilogy.

(I’m quite happy with it though – last night was the first time in a long time that I stayed up way too late, reading a book.)